The number of words published by Florence Stonebraker (about 4.4 million) will, of course, never be overtaken by the number published about her. Still, the dearth of information regarding California’s most prolific female novelist is startling. Except for one small entry in a Who’s Who compendium (rewritten for an earlier post), I’ve come up with nearly nothing -- no biographical data from reviews, no dust jacket blurbs, no obituaries. So I was happy the other day when I returned to Google for another search and found a few tidbits from an online newspaper archive. It turns out that Stonebraker was in Washington as a teenager, played the piano, and performed in some amateur recitals. I also found a blurry newspaper photo that shows her in February 1914 helping to commemorate the deaths of sailors on U. S. S. Maine. Stonebraker was seventeen at the time and probably less than fond of this picture.